The Things That Remain
by bittergrapes
Summary: John writes to Sherlock while he's missing after Reichenbach.


The Things That Remain

_Dear Sherlock_,

My therapist says that writing letters to you will help. I can't fathom why, but then again, the blog helped, didn't it? So I guess I'll give it a shot, if not to actually help, because then you'll know what was going on after you ab-left.

I got home from Switzerland alright. It was not a pleasant trip. I couldn't stop thinking about you and how I should have been there to help you, damn the old woman. I should have been there. I should have saved you.

I still can't believe you're gone. It's been two months now. I still expect you to come home any minute, maybe wearing some ridiculous disguise like you used to in the old days. And I'll faint from shock and wake up with you there. And you'll never leave again.

Maybe it's childish. But I believed in you. You were something more than human to me, something wonderful and undefined, unrefined, unfathomably light and supernatural. And I – anyway. I still want to believe in you.

Please come back.

_Warm regards,_

_John Watson._

* * *

><p><em>Dear Sherlock<em>,

We never talked about our childhoods much. Or anything, really, outside of work. I'm sure you probably have mine all sorted out just from one look at me, but I wanted to tell you anyway. Besides, my therapist says that this will help heal those feelings too, so might as well get it all done in one go. It's been three months, by the way. I'm trying not to dwell, trying to spend time outside and not think about it too much, but to be honest, I don't want to. I don't want to forget you, or move on, or whatever psychiatric bullshit they're saying now. I just want you to come back. I'm sure that makes me sound like a heartsick teenage girl or a lost puppy, but – we can't really help what we feel, and I can't help that I just feel empty without you here. It's like someone gives you morphine and then recycles your blood, takes the high away. I'm in a sort of withdrawal. It looks like it'll be a long one.

My childhood – it was not the greatest. Father drank a lot, probably where Harry gets it from. Mum was gone working as a laundress, and Father was on disability, so he was always around. Got some sort of leg injury in the War, couldn't work. He was always drunk when we got home from school and smacked us around a little, Harry more than me. She always stood up for me and took me upstairs and wiped my tears away, bloody baby I was. Probably why I got into the army as a doctor – I just wanted to prove I wasn't useless. I wasn't some whiny kid who didn't get hugged enough as a baby.

And when I went into the war, I could understand why Father drank so much. The horrible things I saw, it's enough to make anyone lose it. I imagine it was even worse in the War, _his_ war. I can't say it's cleaner now because war is never a beautiful business, but I'd like to think it's a little better. I swear to God that it couldn't get worse.

But I grew up somehow. Got beat up by punks at school. No one liked me much, I never was a people person until I got a bit older. I was too shy and we didn't have much money, so my clothes never fit right and I never had the nice lunchboxes like the other kids. And there was the fact that Harry was always getting into fights for me. That didn't sit well with the other boys. Called every name in the book, especially 'faggot'. _That_ one stung. Especially when I fancied the boy that said it, then it was even worse.

Mycroft and I talked a bit about you. Sounds like you had much the same growing up. Outcast, loner, big sibling always having to fight for you. But we turned out alright, didn't we? God, I hope we did. I hope all that mattered for something.

I bet you'll think this is all quite overwrought when you get home. The day you come home I'll burn these letters so you'll never be bothered by them, really. But they do make it a little easier, you being gone. I just wish you'd given me some sort of warning other than a little text message and your scarf. (I wear it by the way. Nestled up to my throat on the cold nights. I never wear it outside; that just seems too open, too obvious. It's my widow's veil in private. God, that sounds ridiculous.)

But you'll come back; you have to. I still hold strong hope that you didn't die. You couldn't have. It's not possible – well, I mean, it is possible, but you – you are better than that. You need to have better that. Because if that's the way that heroes die … what hope does that leave the rest of us?

_Warm regards,_

_John Watson_

* * *

><p><em>Dear Sherlock,<em>

Have you ever held your wrist against your heart when your pulse races? It feels like two silver strings plucked very fast just slightly out of sequence. Like the world is turning.

I remember the first time I held a human heart in my hand. Medical school, at Barts. Ironically enough I was doing the dissection with Mike Stamford.

They had a bucket of hearts so that we could touch and hold and poke around in one before we cut out our cadaver's. They stank to high heaven – all that formaldehyde. Several people got nauseous that day and had to leave, and Mike and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. Oh, bless the innocent. How innocent we were.

I held it, about the size of my fist. Such a delicate thing, but so strong. I was surprised at how tough it was, but also so fragile at the same time. Such a paradox. Humans are a paradox. It felt as if I were holding a tiny bird in my hand, a precious little thing. Spongy walls and fibrous tissue. So beautiful. Our cadaver's was a little small for a heart, didn't have much fatty tissue on it. Probably a marathon runner, swimmer, something incredibly active, a beautiful heart.

We ran water through it the wrong way to watch the valves close up. I was fascinated by this organ. So _this _is the thing that powers all of us. This is what we give to someone else when we love them. This beautiful thing, the most bizarrely shaped organ in our body, that never stops working until we die. This bundle of arteries and veins that throbs like an engine inside us. That was the moment that I knew I was meant to be a doctor. I'd fought for scholarships for medical school and begged my parents to help me out and worked my ass off to pass the entrance exams, but it hadn't sunk in yet, until that moment. When I held a heart in my hand and touched its muscles, felt the most intimate part of a human being fill with fluid while I held it, that's when I knew that I was here to save lives.

I remembered that moment when I met you for the first time. That same feeling washed over me, that sense of holding something pivotal, something incredible in your hands, something life-changing. I'd just come home from failing, from trying and trying to save lives and watching, again and again, as they died in my hands. And I needed something to hold onto, I needed to hold a heart in my hands again.

Maybe I'm naïve. But I like to think, when I am shivering here in the dark and feeling my wrist pulse against my chest, that you gave me yours.

_Regards,_

_John_

* * *

><p><em>Dear Sherlock<em>,

There are so many things I wish I'd told you. I wish I told you I loved you. I wish I told you how much I believed in you, even when you told me not to. You were the first person I ever trusted with my life. Even the guys in the military – I didn't trust them, not completely. You were the only person I would kill for. And I did. And I feel no shame.

You were everything to me. And I didn't say so because of my stupid macho army-guy mentality that choked off the words in my throat. I wanted so much to tell you how much you meant to me but some pointless need to be a tough guy held it back.

I remember one time after a case we were sitting at home. I was having a beer and watching the telly while you worked. And you said one thing I will never forget, Sherlock. The one thing that I want to take to the grave with me.

You said, "John, you know I am not one for sentimentality, but if I had to choose one person to live out the rest of my days with, it would be you."

You probably didn't mean it in the way that I thought, but for so long those were the words that gave me hope. You wouldn't leave me like this. You would just run away and leave me to fend myself for the rest of my life, alone. They had to have meant something. _I_ had to have meant something.

I've never told anyone what you said. They were my secret, _our_ secret. But they're starting to wear thin. They're not enough anymore, as selfish as that sounds. Please, Sherlock. I know you are far too incredible for such a mediocre man to have killed you. I can't do this for much longer. Please come home.

_Love,_

_John_

* * *

><p><em>Sherlock<em>,

I know that grief is a process. It's something that comes with time. You begin to accept things that you couldn't accept before. I've worked through this process so many times before. When I lost my first patient to cardiac arrest. When my mother died. When my father died. When I lost Harry to alcoholism, and just last year when I lost her for the last time. I know it's not meant to be comfortable or fun, but you work through it, you fight toward healing, and it ends up okay, no matter how long it takes.

But it's been two years now. I write to you every week; you should see the stacks of letters I've got. And every time the wound seems just as fresh and it hurts just as much as it did when I stood at the edge of that waterfall and looked down into those swirling waters and felt your presence leave me. When I heard the human voice of grief made out of water. It's just not working, you are not going away. I feel your absence so strongly every day that I scarcely believe so much time has passed. It doesn't seem possible to be in so much pain from something that should be healing.

I still miss Harry sometimes. I still miss my mother and father. Hell, I think about that first patient – and the many others, too many of them – from time to time. But your loss is a constant one. It never leaves me. I curl up on your bed and smell you on the sheets and cry. My heart breaks. I can feel it breaking. And it never gets easier. The acceptance never comes. I'm starting to feel it never will.

Perhaps I should move out of this flat, away from your memories, but I can't bear to do it. Mycroft has offered to help me find a job and a flat somewhere else, take care of me while I get back on my feet, but I can't, I can't leave you and this place we shared and all the things we could have had if you hadn't left me. I quit the surgery and fired my therapist and I told Lestrade never to call me on any official business ever again – I'm trying so hard to sever any ties that make me think of you, but there are some cords I just can't cut. I can't leave you in the past. It would be like leaving myself.

I love you – present tense.

_Love,_

_John_.

* * *

><p>Sherlock,<p>

I am slowly losing my grip. I can feel it slipping away from me, each second, each agonizing second. The weight of guilt and self-hatred. It's breaking me. I can't bear it. It's been three years and it's never getting better, it's never getting warmer and every day feels like another fucking funeral for you, the man who never came home, and I don't think I can stand it for even one more breath. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. There are many things I can handle. Holding a dead woman's hand as she shakes off a coma. Seeing best friends and lovers break apart like skittles. But you - you - I cannot handle you. I cannot handle you and the absence of you, not for one more breath. And so this is the goodbye that you'll never hear. It's a pity, because there was so much I wanted to say first.

I am so sorry.

John.

* * *

><p>He came home but there was no one to come home to.<p>

Three years is a long time to wait. He should have known this. He should have known.

But he believed John could withstand it, same as he pitted himself against impossible odds and stood up and took the gun in his hands and shot men in cold blood. Same as he bore the burden of so many secrets and fought so many battles and took on the pressure of living with a human hurricane.

But it seemed this one was too much.

The flat is clean when he gets there. Impossibly clean. Antiseptic clean. Every fibre of the carpet is in place and the walls have been sprayed down and scrubbed within an inch of their life and there's the faintest tinge of red on the coffee table grain.

He knows. No one needs to tell him. He doesn't look himself in the mirror when he vomits into the sink. The long ragged hair and the unshaven face pitted with sores and slow-healing scars – it's not what he wants to see. Not now. He wants to see the face he came for, but that face is gone. He waited too long.

If there is a god, Lestrade got forensics in before Mrs. Hudson had to witness it.

His own room has been left as a sort of shrine. It's in the same chaos it was when he left three years ago; three years and two days and one hour. Since he died for the name of justice. Come back from the dead to find his disciple summoned up instead. Experiments have gone wild in here with no one to test and tame them; there's fungus in all the petri dishes and one of the Erlemeyer flasks is coated in some algae probably as yet unknown to science. A Garden of Eden made by a neglectful god. He sighs. Such filth. It's his lasting imprint on the world.

There is a soft imprint in his bed, in the nest of unwashed blankets and dirty suit jackets. A John-shaped space. He came in here to sleep when it was too much, when he needed to feel the scent of the one he loved, of the one who left him – for what? For justice. No justice is worth this.

Piled beside the bed are smooth white envelopes, hundreds of them. All addressed in the same slow, steady script with a dark black pen. To him, from Dr. John H Watson, MD. Each is labeled neatly with the date and location of their writing. At first they are regular, weekly, but as he riffles through the stack he notes that they become more frequent toward the end; every other day, each day, sometimes twice a day.

The last one is dated one week after the second-to-last. It was written on Sherlock's birthday. He feels slightly nauseous and covers his mouth.

He gathers the first and the last and picks a few in between to read.

Moments later he is dry-heaving, screaming. No one comes. He is alone in his bed, with its John-shaped space and its unwashed blankets and the hundreds of letters that a dead man wrote him begging him to come home. He slams his fist against the nightstand again and again until it comes back bloody, but he can't feel the pain.

He falls asleep shortly after, his hand wrapped close to his chest and smearing his dirty clothes with blood. If a doctor were present he'd bandage it, slather it with ointment, pick out the dirt.

He pulls out stationary and a fountain pen and writes a letter to the man he came home for.

_Dear John,_


End file.
